Ok, my name is Oskar Kirkwood, and I’ve gone ahead and set up a blog for myself…

UPDATE: I got some crazy spam thing on my server and had to completely reinstall WordPress. Not a fun experience.

If you’ve happened to stumble across this website (presumably by accident) and wondering, “why should I care?” then keep reading! It’s almost certainly going to consume a good chunk of your valuable time, and provide you nothing of any substance in return! Sounds like a “win-win” to me.

UPDATE: That does NOT sound like a “win-win”, that sounds like a waste of everyone’s time…
So What Will This Blog Actually “Do” Oskar Kirkwood?

In all seriousness, my site will serve two purposes. One: a place where I can ramble on incessantly about everything and anything that takes my fancy, and two: a tangible location on the internet I can practice my craft and produce content that’s available to the big, bad world.

Don’t expect anything remotely fancy! This is predominantly going to be a “testing laboratory” for a bunch of different WordPress themes and plugin development. And a teeny, weeny bit of creative writing.

First step is going to be to creating a proper theme using a combination of the Twitter Bootstrap 4 Framework (utilising the wonderful SASS extension language), and plunging head first into some kind of plugin… For what, you ask? At this stage I’m almost certainly unsure!
WP Is So Awesome Isn’t It?

I’d be lying if I said that WordPress was remotely “enjoyable” to develop for. It’s a massive tangled MESS of PHP files, without any resemblance of an MVC pattern to work with. Coming from working with frameworks like Codeigniter (and a little Laravel) this just strikes me as pretty hellish. But hey, we can only try can’t we?

In keeping with how non-enjoyable it is to develop for, I am going to pay homage to my early “retro web design” days and put some kind of nasty flash animation into my theme just for s**t’s and giggles. That way I can ensure that this site will be extremely UN-optimised for mobile! Back in my college days, people would say “oh we need to use Flash? That’s a job for Oskar Kirkwood”. I used to do everybody’s homework, so I’m amazed that I wasn’t kicked out.

Ah, Flash, I loved you back when Macromedia was your daddy…

In addition to all this lovely web-dev stuff that I’m doing, I’m also forcing myself to do a bit of writing every week. I’ve always been keen on the idea of doing some creative writing/journaling, and having a blog is somewhat unsubtle way to force myself into that. I’m no “Johnny Shakespeare” so again, don’t expect to be dazzled by the content.
What Does This All Mean Oskar?

This website will probably never, ever, EVER, be in a “polished” state.

In the meantime check out some other stuff I’ve been up to.

Don’t say that I didn’t warn you!

I am Oskar Kirkwood, and this is my website.

Updated 8th March 2022